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off thread interlude for a netiquette nicety: good to see you back here, miss not having a lefty around that's not into dragging everyone to the lowest common denominator, and has a sense of humor to boot.

Well, I suppose I am obliquely impugning the professionalism of the Department of Justice (pearl clutchers welcome.)

As I understand the process, a failure to comply with a congressional subpoena that is enforceable by a contempt of congress charge must ultimate in pursuit by the appropriate US Attorney's office of an indictment.

I'm guessing that, since Congressional Committees "live" in DC, the US Attorney for DC would be the office out of which such an indictment would issue, and, of course, this (normally non-discretionary) act can be "slow walked" or even "no walked" without an obvious remedy available to the Congressional Committee Chair who requested the enforcement action.

As I game this through, I do see a glimmer of a workaround, viz, the committee could hold it's hearing in a venue other than DC (I think they do go on the road when the optics suggest) to a city where the US Attorney had not yet been thoroughly suborned to serve the despot.

That said, it is not immediately clear to me that if the DOJ , institutionally, simply sits on the request for an indictment, other than the political costs that might arise from a "furor", there is anything a chairman can do.

Early in American history, Congress punished contempt itself — exercising an inherent contempt power through which offending witnesses were held in the Old Capitol Jail until they provided the sought-after testimony or the end of that session of Congress, whichever came first. But the Old Capitol Jail is long gone, and Congress’s inherent contempt power has lain dormant ever since. Instead, contempt of Congress today is usually handled through an 1857 federal statute, codified today at 2 U.S.C. § 192, which authorizes Congress to certify a contempt citation to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

That requires the Justice Department to agree to bring the prosecution, though; Congress cannot force the Justice Department to prosecute anyone for anything. And it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which this Justice Department would be in no particular hurry to prosecute executive branch officials who, at the president’s insistence, have defied congressional subpoenas — perhaps even after the courts have rejected the grounds on which the subpoenas were defied.

The subtext here is the Wall Street bailouts and foreclosure wave. All Democratic leaders essentially supported it. This is why there’s grumbling, but no alternatives. The Democrats have really just started their internal debate over big money. https://t.co/8XKgqvJYn2

Brookings Institution fellow Elaine Kamarck on Friday compared President Trump's rhetoric on immigration to "the boy who cried wolf. I think that the president at this point with immigration is like the boy who cried wolf," Kamarck, who also directs the Center for Effective Public Management, told Hill.TV's Jamal Simmons on "What America's Thinking."

What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”....“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual.